Inside Obama’s Iran nuclear deal Trump withdrew from it

President Donald Trump on Friday defended the continued lack of an agreement to end the war with Iran by once again scrapping the nuclear deal forged by Barack Obama, his predecessor and political foe.

“They faced very weak and ineffective leadership on behalf of the United States” and others that “allowed them to get away with murder,” Trump said of Iran in an NBC News interview.

He was asked why Iran is still holding talks if it wants to reach a deal, as Trump insists it is.

“It takes a while … This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said when pressed.

He then brought up the Obama-era nuclear deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — that Trump pulled the US out of in 2018 and never renegotiated.

“That deal was like giving them a nuclear weapon. It was a bad deal that was given by Barack Obama, and actually written by him,” Trump told NBC. “It was terrible.”

It was not the first time that Trump enjoyed the JCPOA, which was reached in 2015 by an international organization including the US.

“THE DEAL we’re making with Iran will be so much better,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 20, adding minutes later that such a deal would come “soon!”

It has become the norm for Trump as the war with Iran, which he said would last four to six weeks, has reached a fourth month without an interim peace deal, let alone a resolution to Iran’s nuclear threat.

Trump often says that if he had not pulled the US out of the JCPOA, Iran would have already acquired and used nuclear weapons.

But many national security experts say the deal, while incomplete, succeeded in its primary goals of halting Iran’s march toward expansion and enabling effective monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear activities.

And since Trump withdrew, Iran has violated the JCPOA’s nuclear restrictions, including ramping up its uranium enrichment and backtracking on some of the transparency measures the deal had established.

Asked in an NBC interview why he didn’t negotiate a better nuclear deal during his first term, Trump said, “It takes years to do these things.”

Trump also said on NBC that the JCPOA was “long overdue.” But many of its key provisions were permanent, while others were set for 15 or 20 years or more.

“I find it hard to say how much better off we are” right now, Ernest Moniz, who was the US energy secretary when 2015 was filed, told CNBC.

“Perhaps there will be a rabbit pulled out of the hat. We all hope so. But right now, the conditions will not be as good as they were ten years ago,” he said.

Here’s what you need to know about the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal:

The US has expressed concern since the 1970s that Iran might pursue a nuclear weapons program. A 1995 US intelligence report said the Islamic Republic was “vigorously pursuing” that capability and, with foreign assistance, could produce a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade.

In response to international pressure, Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, according to US intelligence. But concerns continued to grow, especially following the disclosure of Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment facility in 2009, which had been kept secret from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The US has imposed various sanctions on Iran for decades as it seeks to influence Tehran and rein in its opposition behavior. While those sanctions hurt Iran’s economy and slowed the country’s nuclear program, they did not end the threat perceived by the international community.

Part of that idea stems from Iran’s rapid development of centrifuges, needed to produce material that could be used in nuclear bombs, in the 2000s.

“When the Bush administration took office, Iran had no centrifuges,” Obama said in 2015, but “when I took office, Iran had installed several thousand centrifuges, and showed no inclination to slow down — or even stop — its program.”

In 2013, the US, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia and Germany – known as the P5+1 – began negotiations with Iran, which led to the “Joint Action Plan,” an interim agreement that went into effect in January 2014. The JCPOA followed, finalized in July 2015.

The 160-page agreement contained many provisions. More broadly, it imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, and imposed new verification and inspection requirements, in order to lift nuclear-related sanctions.

Parts of the agreement, including some key transparency rules, were put into effect indefinitely. Some provisions were set to expire – some after only 10 years.

Under the deal, Iran was limited to about 660 kilograms of uranium enriched to only 3.67% for 15 years. That enrichment level is typically used for commercial nuclear power plants.

According to the latest IAEA assessment in February, Iran as of June 2025 had a total of enriched uranium of about 21,800 pounds. Of that amount, more than 970 pounds have been reduced by up to 60%. Although uranium is considered “weapons grade” at 90% enrichment, it is used as a nuclear explosive at the 60% mark.

The deal also included measures to limit Iran’s installed centrifuges, prevent it from producing weapons-grade plutonium and stop its development of nuclear infrastructure.

“The most important feature of the JCPOA was the extraordinary measures of verification and transparency,” Moniz said.

“Unlike all other countries in the world, the [IAEA] inspectors will need to be granted access to the suspected hideout within 24 days,” he explained.

Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, called the JCPOA’s monitoring regime “unique and critical” to its success.

“The JCPOA includes the most complex monitoring and surveillance system ever negotiated,” Davenport told CNBC in an email. “The agreement wasn’t perfect, but it was an effective, verifiable agreement. We got the job done.”

Critics, however, blasted the JCPOA. They accused Obama of rewarding Iran for war while talking about sunset clauses and the deal’s lack of focus on other forms of Iranian aggression, including its missile program and its support for terrorism.

The agreement would “avoid any remaining pressure to comply with the terms of the agreement while using that money to further its aggressive expansion throughout the Middle East,” then-Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a 2015 op-ed.

Trump, in his 2018 speech about withdrawing the JCPOA, said, “If I let this deal stand, there will soon be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Everyone will want their weapons ready by the time Iran has theirs.”

By some estimates, however, Iran’s “cooling off” — the time it would take to enrich enough material for a bomb — was significantly reduced in the years following the US withdrawal from the JCPOA.

The JCPOA remained in effect after the US withdrew from it. But it is “history” as far as Moniz is concerned.

“It is not being followed, it is not being followed by Iran, so in my opinion a new agreement must be reached,” he said.

That new deal remains to be seen, despite occasional reports that the parties are close to a deal and with Trump often signaling that it is coming.

Meanwhile, other reports indicate that Trump’s willingness to strike a stronger deal than Obama’s has led to a sticking point in negotiations, including whether Iran will receive any kind of financial compensation.

“There is limited utility in comparing any nuclear deal reached today with the JCPOA,” Davenport told CNBC.

The new agreement “needs to address the great uncertainty about Iran’s nuclear assets and technology due to the gap in inspections and the uncertainty created by the US and Israeli bombings,” he said. “An effective deal in 2026 will also need to address the technological advances Iran made after the collapse of the JCPOA and increased political incentives for Iran to use weapons.”

Moniz noted that the Iranians “always say they are determined not to have a nuclear weapon … but our attitude was ‘don’t trust and verify.’

“That’s really what the JCPOA was all about,” he said. “President Trump has chosen a different set of priorities, and so far those aren’t working well.”